Lecture: 'Take Up the Challenge'

In 500 years, our views on evil have changed completely. From monsters, demons and witches to the cruelties of what people do to each other. Philosophically speaking, evil has changed from being vertical to being horizontal. The philosopher Sartre says: “hell is other people”. “Other people”, that is: you. Hell is you, that is. Modern philosophy says you can’t talk about evil without talking about yourself. Take up the challenge and explore the history of evil and how bad you really are.

Tempelman contributes to multiple blogs and is the founder of Denkjewel.nl. Under the title God or Not he wrote a series of three articles in which he questions the historical proof of God (and their refutations) and he relates to what philosophers thought about this subject. In a related article he reflects on the arguments against the existence of God. The most used argument is that of evil: “Since there is evil, there can’t be a God”.

Bio - Gerko Tempelman (1988) studied theology and philosophy and keeps himself busy with the oddness of life and how to discover what is meaningful in the postmodern playground. In his quest, Tempelman has developed several projects like the Dutch Death Cafe(‘conversations about death at the coffee table’) and the Dutch Church for Atheists. He has taught classes like The Meaning(-lessness) of Life, _A Brief History of Hell _and Philosophy and Islam (How the Arab science and enlightenment was brought to the European Middle Ages) at institutions like _The School of Life _and the _Vrije Academie _in Amsterdam.

Students react to the lecture 'Take Up the Challenge' by guest speaker Gerko Tempelman

Ritual performance by ALEX WEBBER, DIMITRI WITTEMBERG, DANIELE FORMICA & SUYOUNG YANG:The artwork for this lecture deals with the idea of approaching evil in a playful, childish and innocent way, trough a ritualistic and absurd performance